18th -20th April

The children have been putting some of their ideas into practice this week. We have been building shelters and trying to create our own Stone Age settlement. We've made small versions inside tyres, with the children constructing mini shelters, pretend fires, trees and one child built a tiny fish drying rack. They appear to have absorbed a great deal of information from the two books we are basing our topic on.
We had a go at modelling Stonehenge. There was lots of discussion, negotiation, ordering and matching of materials, and incredible structures all over the classroom. We're moving our stone circle activities outside next week.
We know Stone Age people had some sort of drums so we added a little drumming band to our singing this week and we used drums to send coded messages/instructions across the playground. ( For instance, 5 big beats on the drum meant 'Do the crocodile.').
We've discussed and written about wants and needs and looked at how people live across our planet. We discovered that many people live in similar shelters to Stone Age people.
We were very lucky to welcome lambs to the Foundation Phase this week. The children were very calm and showed great care. Some were able to feed one of the lambs- before it got too full! The children were all careful with the animals and washed their hands afterwards. Children were invited to create a sheep inspired printed picture with paints after the lambs left.
Free choice in Forest Schools led to another Stone Age settlement going up and a grand plan to camp out there for the night. The children were very disappointed to have to tidy all their hard work away.